browseFarewell Squalor
Sally-Ann Norman (Photographer)
Text of original exhibition press release, October 2003
For the past two years, Newcastle-based architectural photographer Sally-Ann Norman has been exploring the subject of housing in the Durham Coalfield. Her first documentary project, it is part of Side Gallery's Coalfield Stories programme of new production.
The ribbons of terraces that crest the hills of West Durham; the social housing of the twenties and thirties; the high-minded post-war visions; the current wave of demolitions across East Durham: it is a monumental narrative of rapid, brutal and careless expansion, of communal growth and municipal strength, of abandonment, exhaustion and contraction. There is a richness of ambition in Farewell Squalor, the 1946 report that led to the founding of Peterlee a couple of years later:
Let us, therefore, close our eyes on the nineteenth century degradation and squalor, and let us only look with unseeing eyes on the sordid excrescence of the first decade of this century, let us blind ourselves to the septic and ugly building wens and ribbons perpetrated and planted on us between the wars, but let us open our eyes and look brightly forward and onward to the new town, the new living . . . Peterlee.
It's a sense of hope that drives through the history of coalfield housing, from the establishment of the Durham Aged Mineworkers' Homes Association in 1898 to Durham County's 'Strategic Vision' of 2003. The realities may sometimes have fallen short of the visions, but scale of the difficulties and the ambitions remains and the report gave Sally the title for her exhibition.